Conventional wisdom isn’t always wise, of course, and quite often it changes. The latter might now be the case with what most of us have learned as e-mail users – and imparted to others – regarding the wisdom of exercising the opt-out option in spam.
Conventional wisdom comes to be known as such for good reason: Enough generally smart people reach a rough consensus on a particular subject to give that consensus at least the appearance of common sense.
It’s why we don’t eat undercooked pork and tell our kids not to take candy from pop singers.
Conventional wisdom isn’t always wise, of course, and quite often it changes.
The latter might now be the case with what most of us have learned as e-mail users – and imparted to others – regarding the wisdom of exercising the opt-out option in spam. In short, the best advice has been “don’t do it.” Not only is it a waste of time, this reasoning has held, it’s also likely to be counterproductive. You might have read such words here two weeks ago.
But is the advice wise, or merely conventional?
“You repeat the often-heard mantra ‘that responding to opt-out requests is a fool’s errand that only confirms to spammers that they have reached an active e-mail address,’ ” writes Joel Trammell, CEO of network management vendor NetQoS. “This statement has never made any sense to me. Why would a spammer take the time to look at who tries to opt out and send more e-mail to them? I understand that most of the time the opt-out links don’t work – because spammers don’t want to take you off their list – but I can’t think of any reason a spammer would capture the e-mail address of people who opt out just to send them more spam.
“I believe this is one of those ‘facts’ that has been repeated so many times [that] people believe it must be true, but I don’t think there is any evidence to support the idea.”
Depends on what you think of the conventional wisdom . . . and where it stands today.
The knowledge that an e-mail address is active – more precisely that thousands of e-mail addresses on an assembled list are active – has indeed been a commodity that shady brokers of e-mail lists have sold successfully to spammers, says Paul Hoffman, director of the Internet Mail Consortium and a genuine go-to guy on all matters related to spam. (Although, as Hoffman notes, it’s a mystery why spammers would believe anything that their suppliers tell them about the quality of those addresses, given that the suppliers, too, are often spammers.)
More to the point, the market for such “clean” lists apparently isn’t what it used to be.
“Spammers don’t care whether you’re there or not anymore,” Hoffman says. “They just want to get you to a Web site.”
Which means they’re no longer hungry for active address lists. And that lowers the risk of you landing on one by replying to an opt-out option.
“The dumb spammers are still doing that,” Hoffman adds, but their numbers are such that choosing to opt out ought not increase one’s overall level of spam … at least not much.
“I don’t believe anymore that opting out hurts,” he says.
Nor does he believe it will bring a user much relief, but that’s a different topic.
As for Trammell, he’s already acting on his convictions.
“I have adopted a strategy of opting out [when possible] and it certainly doesn’t seem to have made things worse and it does reduce the ‘more legitimate’ spam,” he says. “Making a judgment call to opt out when it appears to be a ‘real’ business and just deleting the message when it appears designed to drive Web traffic might be the best we can do.”
Personally, I don’t have the patience. And I can see the difficulty in trying to convey such a nuanced approach to thousands of corporate users.
But I also could see this having the makings of a new conventional wisdom.
Have an unconventional thought? The address is buzz@nww.com.
